PART 3

I sat beside Jeffrey on the bed.

“I need to confess something too.”

His head lifted immediately.

“For the last five months, I’ve been standing in front of mirrors hating everything I see. I convinced myself you stayed because you felt sorry for me. I kept waiting for the day you would finally admit you didn’t find me attractive anymore.”

“I could never feel that way about you.”

“And all this time, you were thinking the exact same thing about yourself.”

For a second, neither of us spoke.

Then I laughed.

It came out mixed with tears.

“We’re idiots.”

Jeffrey’s mouth twitched.

“We really are.”

“Twenty years of marriage, and we drove all the way back to our honeymoon hotel only to hide in separate rooms because each of us thought we weren’t good enough for the other.”

Jeffrey laughed too, wiping his eyes.

“I paid sixty dollars for torture underwear.”

That made me laugh harder.

“I bought a new dress and hid it in my suitcase because I was terrified you’d hate the way I looked in it.”

Within seconds, we were both laughing and crying at the same time.

For the first time since my diagnosis, I stopped thinking about my own reflection.

Instead, I looked at the man sitting beside me and realized something I had completely missed.

While I had been fighting cancer, Jeffrey had been struggling too.

He had been terrified of losing me. He had stopped sleeping, eating properly, exercising, and taking care of himself. But because all the attention had been focused on keeping me alive, he had quietly convinced himself that his problems weren’t important enough to mention.

I had spent months believing he saw me differently.

Meanwhile, he had spent those same months terrified that I would see him differently.

We had never stopped loving each other.

We had simply stopped letting each other see what we were afraid of.

Jeffrey took a deep breath and removed the painful compression garment completely.

The red marks around his body were still visible, but he no longer tried to cover them.

“Come here,” I said.

He turned toward me.

For several seconds, we simply looked at each other beneath the warm hotel lights.

No oversized shirts.

No locked bathroom doors.

No second room down the hallway.

No pretending.

I placed my hand gently against his stomach.

He tensed instinctively but didn’t pull away.

Then Jeffrey reached toward me and carefully rested his hand against the scar tissue on my chest—the part of myself I had spent months avoiding in mirrors.

His touch was gentle.

Warm.

Familiar.

“No more hiding,” he whispered.

“No more hiding.”

He rested his forehead against mine.

That weekend didn’t restore our bodies to the way they looked twenty years earlier.

My hair didn’t magically grow back.

My scars didn’t disappear.

Jeffrey didn’t suddenly lose the weight he had gained.

But none of that was what needed fixing.

What we needed was honesty. We needed to stop assuming we knew what the other person was thinking. We needed to stop hiding our pain because we were afraid it would make us less desirable.

And we needed to understand that both of us had survived the previous year in different ways.

The woman in our honeymoon photographs no longer existed exactly as she once had.

Neither did the man standing beside her.

But the people underneath those changes were still us.

Still married.

Still frightened.

Still imperfect.

And still choosing each other.

For the first time in almost a year, Jeffrey didn’t turn away from me.

And neither did I.